Reading Implication: Forgiveness and American Innocence in Catherine Lacey’s "Pew" (2020)

Abstract

This article examines how Catherine Lacey’s Pew (2020) critically portrays discourses of forgiveness in relation to the so-called “Myth of American innocence” and offers a productive site for engaging with Michael Rothberg’s concept of implication–how individuals are entangled in violence and harm beyond the perpetrator-victim binary. Drawing on recent work on literary narrative, implicated subjectivity, narratology, and reader-response theory, we argue that Pew both represents and performs implicated subjectivity: through its themes and narrative structure, the novel positions readers to confront social and historical violence often obscured by contemporary narratives of forgiveness. Integrating Rothberg’s framework with theories of affect and embodiment, we show how Lacey’s formal strategies–second-person address, narratorial effacement, and the narrator’s ambiguous identity–transform reading into an ethical encounter. The article contributes to debates in literary ethics, narratology, and implication by demonstrating how fiction may both depict and generate implicated subjectivities.